the soft fall of land | Group Exhibition at The Library Project

Event Details

the soft fall of land
5 – 27 September 2025

Curated by Ciara Hickey

Preview: Thursday 4 September 2025 from 6 – 8 pm at The Library Project, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2.

Featuring selected BCPS and invited artists: Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Chloe Brenan, Aisling Conroy, Grace Ryan, Soft Fiction Projects

Black Church Print Studio is delighted to present the soft fall of land curated by Ciara Hickey.

This exhibition brings together new work by Bassam Issa al-Sabah, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Chloe Brenan, Aisling Conroy, Grace Ryan and Soft Fiction Projects. It considers the idea of Utopia and examines the pursuit of this imagined, impossible and aspirational state from a range of perspectives. The artworks in the exhibition oscillate between escapism and activism, fantasy and instruction for creating an alternative, better world.

Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell and Bassam Issa al-Sabah have each made a new series of prints directing us into dense, imagined worlds, created from a personal lexicon of symbols drawn from the artists’ history, experience and critical response to the humanitarian, social and ecological issues pervading contemporary life.

Al-Sabah’s monochromatic prints, made during his Process Residency at Black Church Studios, evoke imagery from his moving image works and installations, where sublime, seductive digital landscapes offer speculative worlds in which dystopian and utopian scenarios meet and intersect. Bhreathnach-Cashell, known for her immersive installations and activist work has created a new series of aquatint etchings, ‘Ulster Cycles’. The work translates years of the artist’s unseen drawings and depict mimetic figures using Celtic, biological and architectural imagery, conjuring contemporary fables and cautionary tales.

For Grace Ryan and Chloe Brenan, two studio members at Black Church Print Studio, the invitation to think about Utopian ideals led them to a close examination of the natural world. Ryan will create a sculptural composition in the gallery based on Ikebana—the ancient Japanese art of flower arrangement rooted in balance, asymmetry, and the harmony between humans and nature.

Chloe Brenan’s current work is focused on the microcosm of an orchard in Carlow that is located beside her family home. Originally created as a colonial project to order and control the land, the orchard is now overgrown, the traces of colonial past are muted by the unabetted growth of weeds and shrubs over decades. The artist has used Super 8 photography to mark the process of observing the orchard and acknowledging the small changes and diversity of plant life as dictated by time, climate and chance. Brenan’s work in this exhibition represents the first and last frames of a roll of film on which she photographed the orchard, the edges of which are singed, capturing the moment that an image is simultaneously created and extinguished.

Black Church Print Studio member Aisling Conroy continues her exploration of sound and cymatics, the study of vibrational phenomena. This new work comprises a grid of 40 prints representing the 40 Chladni plates, a methodology developed by Ernst Chladni in 1787 as a visual manifestation of sound vibrations, looking at the patterns produced by sounds on flat plates made by a bow. The work offers an invitation to think about the invisible forces that shape our reality and consider the possibilities of new languages and systems for understanding and grappling with the unknown.

Soft Fiction Projects (Alessia Cargnelli and Emily McFarland) are an initiative that produce printed and digital matter to explore archives of underrepresented voices, oppositional histories and geopolitical narratives. For the exhibition they have produced a free print that can be taken by visitors. The print is based on Women’s News, a Belfast collective-run publication active between 1984 and 2011, who used the medium of print matter as a method for generating common ground, sharing experiences and encouraging community building. This leaflet uses DIY approaches to archival material, collected from MayDay Rooms, as a way to reimagine and revisit this history.

Exhibition continues until Saturday 27 September 2025.
Opening hours: Mon – Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Sat 12 – 6 pm.
Late Opening for Culture Night: Fri 20 Sept. 2025. Open until 9 pm.